Friday, April 02, 2010

This Just In: Nurses Have No Rights

I have writtenfrequently about a health-care crisis that the recently enacted ObamaCare reform bill did not address, nor was intended to address: The crisis in nursing in American hospitals.

The moment that the crisis went from being worrisome to dire was when hospital administrators stopped considering nurses to be care givers and they became "cost centers." It's not possible to pinpoint exactly when that metamorphosis occurred. Ten or 12 years ago is close enough, but the consequences have been all too apparent.

More nurses are leaving the profession than entering it because of the plantation mentality of many hospital administrators, which manifests itself in mandatory overtime, patient overload and burnout, among other things. Meanwhile, the workforce is getting older and grayer, pay raises are fewer and farther between, and only a relatively small percentage of nurses have health insurance, let alone other benefits.All that although nurses are what make hospitals tick, especially went it comes to direct, around-the-clock care of the most seriously ill patients.

The dire straits in which nurses find themselves was nowhere more evident this week than in Philadelphia where 1,500 nurses and other professionals went out on strike at Temple University Hospital over pay and benefits issues and to protest a proposed "gag clause" under which they could be disciplined or fired if the hospital believes they made a publicly disparaging comment about the hospital. In other words, reporting of unsafe care or advocacy of patients.

The hospital's response? It hired 850 highly-paid scabs and sent out Robert Birnbrauer, the head of Temple's human resources department, with this message:

1 comment:

JSpencer
said...

Of course the USC is only truly important if it is being used to prop up the powerful, wealthy, and influential. The working class will just have to manage the best they can within that modern reality. Let them eat cake.

About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.